Some Brief Comments on Hoppe's Justification of the
Private Property Ethic

The argument, as I understand it, takes the following form.

1. If belief in a proposition is inconsistent with being able to
defend it
argumentatively, the proposition is false.

2. In order to argue about the truth of proposition we must have
absolute self
ownership and ownership of scarce means, defined in objective, physical
terms
and obtained via homesteading.

Therefore

3. The denial of a libertarian ethic is false.

So far as I can see, both 1 and 2 are false. With regard to 1,
consider the
proposition "One should never argue about what people should do."
Belief in it
is inconsistent with defending it argumentatively, but that tells us
nothing at
all about whether it is true or false. One could even imagine someone
who did
not believe in the proposition constructing a valid argument proving
that it
was true, although he would presumably stop speaking as soon as he had
completely convinced himself.

As to 2, note that if it is literally true nobody, including Hoppe,
has ever
argued about the truth of propositions, since there are no completely
libertarian societies in which they could do so. That is obviously not
true--and neither is the proposition from which it follows. One can
think of an
enormous number of non-libertarian ethics and non-libertarian societies
consistent with people being able to argue in their defense.

Consider an ethic according to which people have absolute ownership
over half
their waking hours, and are obliged to spend the rest working for
others--eight
hours a day is enough time for quite an extensive philosophical
argument. Or
consider an ethic according to which we are obliged to spend all our
time
working for others, but defending that ethic classifies as working for
others.

As a final example, consider an ethic according to which there are
no rights at
all; everyone is morally free to coerce everyone else whenever he can
get away
with it, but many people succeed in defending themselves well enough so
that
they control much of their own time. According to their ethic they have
no
right to self ownership, nor to anything else, but they have physical
control
over themselves and are therefore able to make arguments. One might
plausibly
claim that this comes close to describing the world we now live in.

The extension of 2 to cover not only self-ownership but libertarian
property
rights as well, and even a particular libertarian theory of what
property
rights are like and how they are acquired, is if anything still less
defensible--almost pure assertion, unleavened by argument. One can
think of
lots of other systems of property rights that would work at least well
enough
to keep some people alive to argue philosophy. Hoppe has somehow
skipped from
"your ethic must allow you to live" to "your ethic must do the best
possible
job of letting people live" to "you must accept Hoppe's preferred form
of
libertarianism" (via "Hoppe's preferred form of libertarianism does the
best
possible job of letting people live").

Counter-examples include all societies that have existed for as long
as one
generation, since in all such societies people did in fact live long
enough to
grow up and argue philosophy, and none of them were pure libertarian
societies.